Distracting wolves and real estate agents
I’m starting the process of looking for a house to buy. The first thing every real estate agent says you need to do is to sign an exclusive contract with a real estate agent before they take you to look at houses.
I spoke to some co-workers, and none of them signed the contracts. I didn’t understand: How can you avoid signing a contract, when the real estate agent, whom you must work with for months, will begin every meeting by telling you that the first thing to do is to sign the contract?
My boss told me that she distracted her agent. Whenever he brought the subject up, she questioned him about details, which led on to other details, until they were in the car and driving to a showing and talking about something else completely.
This would be a useful skill. And I can’t imagine myself pulling it off. Something in my gut would twist, and I would choke on my own words, if I tried to use conversation not to communicate information, but to entrap someone into doing something they didn’t want to do by ensuring that they would have to violate social conventions to get out of it.
(I asked my boss if she’d ever done that to me. She smiled very sweetly and said, “Never!”)
And even if I could get over the choking, stuttering, and turning red, I don’t think I could keep the game up for an entire hour. I’m inclined to do search, not dynamic control optimization—to play chess (okay, Freecell), not to juggle or do magic tricks.
Somebody who did have the power to do that would be able to do awesome Jedi mind tricks. (Like, say, pick up women. Is it a coincidence that some pickup artists are also magicians?)
Are you like me in that way? Are most of us left-brained Spocks who can’t even try to lie or manipulate people? I’ve met a lot of you, and I think the answer is “yes”, but I really want to see your answers. If so, is it because you choose to be that way, or because you have no choice? What is this personality trait that we don’t even have a name for, why is rationality so highly-correlated with it, and what else correlates with it?
If you think we’re being rational to be so rational, say that, too.
At Wolf Park in Indiana, the biologists, who probably have at least a bit of the nerdy rationalist about them, have developed a technique for dealing with wolves when they’re in the enclosure with them. The wolves interact using dominance displays. When humans go into the enclosure, and the wolves realize these same people keep coming back (they ignore visitors), the wolves want to establish the places of these humans in the dominance ladder (pedantic note: ladder, not hierarchy). So they repeatedly try to engage the humans in dominance contests.
The thing about a dominance contest is that quitting equals losing. You can’t opt out of one once it’s started (unless you have super Jedi mind skills). Old-school wolf-handling was to become dominant; the problem with that is that, if you ever go into the wolf enclosure on a day when you have a cold, or are depressed, or just not focused on the task at hand, the nice beta wolf you have regarded as your friend for years may leap on your throat and (at best) throw you to the ground. Even if you survive, you would be ill-advised to ever go back into the wolf pen; an alpha, once overthrown, moves (strangely) to the very bottom of the dominance ladder, and is fair game for every wolf in the pack. The no-teaming-up rule which seems to apply to wolf dominance fights (doesn’t to primates or felines, BTW) no longer applies.
It’s better to leave the question of dominance unsettled. Just like in the schoolyard, a person with an unknown rank has more leeway than one who is ranked; yet isn’t constantly watched for signs of weakness the way an alpha is. (An alpha wolf at Wolf Park once had a lower spinal injury. He must have been in agony, but stayed where he was without whining or moving for 2 days before the humans rescued him—not because he couldn’t move, but (we think) to keep the other wolves from noticing anything funny about his movements.) Also, having the alphas be humans disrupts the pack dynamics that the biologists are studying. So the biologists have developed a strategy of distracting the wolves before they can bring up the question of dominance. One person does whatever it is they need to go into the enclosure to do; while the rest of them use toys, food, head-skritching, and tag-team techniques to keep any one wolf from focusing on any one human for long.
This is a use of the same technique that my boss used, that is practical and ethically laudable. Could you do that? If so, what makes it different?
I still don’t think I could do it. The cognitive load of trying to observe wolves and continually come up with novel distractions would be too great. I don’t think I could do it on the fly—at least, not well enough to ask people to bet their lives on it. My mind operates with a long clock cycle. I am CISC, not RISC. Is that what makes nerds so famously poor at social interaction—that our minds are GOFAI, not cybernetics?
Interesting! So instead of trying to come out on top as Alpha, one can just avoid being ranked entirely. Does that work with humans? It seems like this is something many introverts would prefer.
Also, to what degree can one prevent oneself from unconsciously ranking others? Are there / could there be (in actuality, as opposed to pretense) such things as status-free social groups? And if so, is that a good thing?
My guess is that mobs where everyone is anonymous are relatively social status free, and we know there are both positive and negative side effects to that. Is anonymity required for a status-free group to exist though?
Technically, when you avoid being ranked you don’t avoid being ranked entirely. See Marx’s Laws Of Status Illegibility
It’s intuitively sensible because even if you’re unranked you know you’re not the Alpha, therefore you have some sort of rank. You’ll probably still have to play some status games.
Zed, thank you for that link! I wish I could vote this up to 20. That ribbonfarm post goes deeply into the topic, but more than that, the whole blog itself is a goldmine that I didn’t even know existed.
We just told him we were insulted he wanted us to sign a piece of paper and if he wanted to work with us, he was just going to have to trust us. It worked in our case.
You obviously had a strong bargaining position relative to your agent. Why not use it to ask for a reduction (rebate) in commissions, instead of trust?
I was prepared to let him walk. He really had offended us.
This doesn’t seem to be an answer to Wei Dai’s question.
I parse the given answer as “because the social status was worth more to me than a monetary discount”. (Though ‘because I didn’t think of it’ might be a more strictly accurate answer.)
The comment misunderstands what was going on. I wasn’t trying to manipulate him into doing anything. I just didn’t want to sign his piece of paper.
If we’re so smart why do we spend our whole attention on the informational content of messages and not the context under which they’re being communicated?
I’ve only realized that this is a big part of my problem recently.
This may be stating the obvious, but the context often IS the informational content. Small talk especially has no surface level informational content so the goal of small talk isn’t, obviously, to exchange surface level information.
This is another one of those situations where it’s tempting (but wrong) to reason “Regular people like small talk. Small talk doesn’t convey any information. Therefore small talk is pointless. Conclusion: regular people are insane and like to waste their time with pointless stuff”. Funnily enough, when we try to figure out the behavior of other mammals we would never be so quick jump to the conclusion that they are idiots.
What (subtextual) information is typically exchanged in small talk? And I wonder if anything plays the role of small talk in online communications.
Group status, 1-on-1 status, mood—all that mammalian stuff. Most of that comes through side channels: posture, tone, eye movements. As for equivalent side-channels in online communications, compare:
u can say alot of things wihout words rite?? :)
I’m sure you’ve already thought of this, but have you considered the information content of syntax as well as semantics? Sorry to bother you.
Augh, RTFM you n00b, don’t waste our time with this BS. Punctuation, tone, and w0rd ch01c3 are covered on the wiki for online chat.
You can put a chimp in front of a keyboard, but it’s still a chimp.
What I find fascinating are the different levels of subtext-literacy I encounter online. Everyone is hard-wired to internalize their culture’s body language model at a young age, but exposure to the internet equivalent varies widely. I imagine that being internet-communication-illiterate is something like visiting a foreign country—you can understand and make yourself understood, but you stick out like a sore thumb and are blind to every kind of subtlety.
The obvious guess would be information about our own interests and dispositions. Or perhaps even sizing each-other up intellectually in much the same way those wolves do.
Hey, who’s this “we?” :P
OR:
Practice practice practice.
Because you thrive in this environment, it’s hard for me to believe you couldn’t learn to do such things—but delightful if true.
I don’t want to dispense misguided generic advice, but I find I prefer, rather than believing “I (probably) can’t do X”, to instead tell myself “I expect to perform poorly at X, until I get enough experience really trying”. In either case I can avoid ever trying, but with the second I feel better, and am more likely to consider plans where I have to do X, and so may actually get around to some productive trying+failing.
Of course, it may really be correct to think yourself permanently below-par (either in cost to learn or eventual ceiling).
I would have expected by default that a human would:
be good at manipulating people and
claim/believe that they are be bad at it.
They’re definitely not mutually exclusive :)
Presumably you mean that magicians are more likely to be pickup artists than non-, or conversely, but didn’t want to over-claim.
I think part of the “trick” is that you distract yourself at the same time—the way to not think of a pink elephant is to concentrate on something else.
This strikes me as right. Rationalists train ourselves not to reflexively avoid thoughts, which is the skill at work here. Effective deception requires selectively ignoring truth.
I would like to voice some dissent. I think that consequentially, organizations like the Real Estate industry are capitalizing on social niceness to get more money out of both the buyer and seller. Individual agents are in it for themselves, and are not being truthful if they claim to have your interests in mind. This is largely true of the entire service industry. Not to say they are evil, should be destroyed, or whatever. But since they are using social dark arts to get your money, I see little problem with using whatever tools at your disposal to keep them from it. Like the wolves, they may not know better, but they are still preying on you.
One feature of a lot of organizations is that the agent has some discretion, but the option that helps you the most is often less convenient. If the person likes you, or if you are related to someone they consider important, or if you can bribe or threaten them in the right way, the world is far more open to you than if you quietly accept your fate. This is similar to the situation in the book Games Prisoners Play when a new inmate to a prison was asked a key phrase in the form of a yes-no question. If they answered in the affirmative or negative, they were obviously new and were treated as such (worse if they lied). If they knew the proper answer, they were immediately afforded some level of respect.
If you can’t identify when you are playing a game, you are bound to lose it, and you will pay for it.
I am also unskilled at deceiving or distracting people. But I don’t think that’s an inherent personality trait. I believe that most interpersonal interaction consists of subconscious skills and scripts that can be executed subconsciously once we decide to execute them. The following skills are things I had to learn:
Start a conversation with a stranger
Arrange to meet someone at a later date
Ask a stranger for directions
Ask someone a personal question
Be interviewed by police
Buy things from a store
Order food at a sit-down restaurant
Ask a store clerk for a discount (I’m still working on this one)
I had to practice all of these several times before I could execute them without feeling flustered, and I had to practice some more before I could execute them while my mind was elsewhere. Deceiving or distracting someone seems like just another skill, except you’ll fail the first few times you do it because your flustered state will give you away. No big deal.
I’m not sure the common cause is rationality as much as it is (trans)humanism. There are many traits that readers of this blog tend to share, and rationality certainly isn’t the only one. I’m the same way, and while I think rationality may be part of the cause, I suspect the larger cause is my humanist tenancies. I’m also rule utilitarian about lying, so there’s that.
And of course one could argue that the distal cause of the humanism/utilitarianism is rationality, but let’s not go there.
Do you have links about the wolf-zookeeper interactions? It seems fascinating, but my Google Fu did not find anything good.
No links. I took the Wolf Behavior and Captive Management course at Wolf Park in 1997, and used “The management and socialization of captive wolves”, a short (68p) description of their practices. Costs $25.
I definitely recognize what you’re going through, and feel the same thing myself. I can’t pull off a trick like that if I know I’m deceiving/misleading someone against their interest. Heck, that explains a lot of my difficulties.
I feel much the same. When I was younger, I would routinely distract my parents with a discussion or claim or change of topic in order to not continue talking about something uncomfortable; and my siblings are equally good at doing the same (or turning the topic onto me!). But I’m not sure I could have pulled those tricks off if I were consciously thinking about how to deceive my parents.
I’ve been wracking my brain to come up with a realistic scenario where I wouldn’t feel bad about engaging in this sort of behavior. The only thing I could come up with was buying a new car.
You would feel bad about distracting wolves?
Literal or metaphorical?
I would feel bad about using manipulation on people. But if someone’s life was at stake, I would feel much worse if I could have done something and they died. I just don’t ever expect to find myself in that situation.
I meant literally. The purpose of the wolf example was to provide a scenario where you wouldn’t feel bad about this sort of behavior.
I would probably be very nice and try to grab empathy by using vague words (such as fairness, etc.), asking the real estate agent to ‘help me out’, and explaining things in terms of feelings. Hopefully, after the initial discussion, I wouldn’t have to keep doing this over and over again, but even if I do, this has the advantage of seperating the “persuade real-estate agent to keep working with you while not signing a contract” from the “get information” part, and so is probably less likely to distract me from the important bits.
I don’t think this would be terribly hard for me. I’m trying to think of possible explanations for this, but none of them are feeling like they model my internal mechanics well.
Disclaimer: I have never actually worked with a real estate agent.